DATE: Thursday 24 March 2016

TIME: 15:40 – 18:00

PLACE: H-355, Bilkent University, Ankara

*Abstract*:

Revisionary ontologies appear to disagree with common sense about which material objects there are. There are powerful arguments for these views, but even after having provided them, their proponents face the Problem of Reasonableness: they need to explain why most reasonable people hold beliefs apparently incompatible with the true ontology. According to mainstream approaches to this problem, the mismatch between ordinary belief and the true ontology is either merely apparent or superficial. In their place, I propose my unapologetic view, which consists of a causal and an evaluative component. In the causal component, I argue that our tendencies to form beliefs about material objects were influenced by selective pressures that were independent from the ontological truth. In the evaluative component, I draw a parallel with the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that whatever is the best treatment of this problem, the revisionary ontologist can apply it to ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. I conclude that the unapologetic view emerges as an attractive, stable, and hitherto overlooked solution to the Problem of Reasonableness.

David Lewis famously argued that according to fiction f, p is true should be analyzed as in the closest possible worlds in which f is told as known fact, p. Despite its intuitive appeal – and the ease with which the analysis provides the intuitive correct truth-values (and even explanations) for claims about fiction – the approach has surprisingly few followers. The problem is in part the implication that fictional characters are possible (but non-actual) objects, a consequence that has engendered objections both from metaphysics and from philosophy of language. In this talk I will defend possibilism with an emphasis the language-related problems. I will in particular provide a response to Saul Kripke’s very influential objection to possibilism and show that if names are directly referential, which they are, then fictional characters should be possible objects. In general, I will argue that fictional and modal discourse should receive the same interpretation with regard to referential relations and ontology, and if possible worlds provide good models for modality they provide good models for fiction, too.

Call for Abstracts:
The Middle East Technical University Philosophy Department’s graduate
students are organizing a conference for graduate students. The conference
will take place over the weekend of 11-12 June 2016. The language of the
conference is Turkish. Please distribute the call for papers below to
graduate students who might be interested in submitting their works.

One feature of Sellars’s ‘philosophical’ semantics (EAE §§40, 67) concerns ‘syn- thetic necessary truths’ (SM 2:53, 3:18–19), a direct successor to C. I. Lewis’s (MWO, 1929: 227–9, 254–8) relativised pragmatic a priori. Following Reichenbach, Lewis and Parrini, I argue (briefly) that the relativised synthetic a priori required for natural science cannot be merely linguistic (§3). I then argue in detail that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely meta-linguistic (§§4–7). So doing identifies the key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism; the role of that distinction in contrasting Lewis’s robust pragmatic realism in MWO(1929) to his empiricist relapse in AKV (1946); the key
contrast between the robust pragmatic realism of Classical American pragmatism and meta-linguistically inclined neo-pragmatism; and shows that Brandom’s (2015) inferentialist semantics is neo-pragmatist, not pragmatically realist; and that Sellars developed his philosophical semantics on behalf of robust pragmatic realism. Unlike Brandom, Sellars made his way back to robustly realist classical pragmatism by attending
closely to Carnap’s use of his formal semantics and its methodological links to Carnap’s explication of conceptual ‘explication’. Carnap’s explication of ‘explication’ reconnects to Lewis’s pragmatic realist semantics in MWO.